Crazy! I have one of JFK. Two profiles, mirror image, in blue. An art student I knew did it and I bought it cheap when he sold a bunch of stuff at graduation.

it sounds naughty but this site:

http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/

has an online version of rastorizing your images so that if you don't have photoshop you don't need to worry. plus, it will set you up to print your image on however many sheets of paper you want, as well as with or without a bleed/cut area.

I had to do this for a design class. If you want to do the manual (non-photoshop) method: Take a picture and put a clear sheet (like a sheet protector) over it. Draw a grid on the plastic. Make a grid on your canvas. Look at one square of the picture at a time and average the color in that square. It helps to blur your eyes. Then, as Kevin says, paint by number.

This is cool. Does anyone know how the bike is dangling from the ceiling like that? Thanks!

good point, leskat... that's a definite alternative to the photoshop route.

and just to add- in my experience with the lincoln, many people think it's purely an abstract, which is kind of fun. once they back-up to get a little distance, the image begins to reveal itself.

me again. re: the bike- i have a pulley attached to the ceiling above the front door. if you do a search for "bike hoist" you'll find a bunch of options. i got mine on amazon. hope that helps!

I'm going to put a damper on this party by admitting that pixelated paintings hurt my eyes. I wish I were joking.

I thought rasterbating was different than pixelating. I am looking to pixelate some family photos and then paint them out as Christmas gifts. I can't afford PhotoShop. Can it be done with PhotoShop Elements? I had downloaded some free software, but it infected my laptop and I won't try that again.

I thought is was abstract until I took a second look.

I was given a blank canvas a few years ago... maybe THIS could be the project it's been waiting for!

Laurel, do you remember those 'magic eye' pictures that littered the '90's? I tried a few times but could never make out a single 'hidden' image - all I got out of them was eye strain and a desire to reach for the matches! The only one I ever appreciated, inspite of never really looking at it myself, was one which had been pinned to the living room door in a house-share, by a particularly obnoxious 'house guest' who out-stayed his welcome by around a year (each of us thought he was a guest of the others so did not want to offend them by suggesting that he left...I know, I know...).
Anyway, it was bit of a party house and on one such occasion, I came bounding down the stairs and flung the living room door open only to have it stop halfway, after rebounding off the face of the guy who was, apparently, just the other side of it, demonstrating how to see the hidden image in his magic-eye picture, by standing close enough in front of it... The absence of sympathy in the room was telling and, shortly after stopping the unstoppable door, the immovable house guest...moved!

For those looking for a free alternative to creating pixel-based art from photos there is an online app that will let you do it called Heavy Mural - heavymural.com

You can use a picture from your local computer and it will convert it to pixel art. There are some settings you can play with to change colors, scale, etc. And when you are happy you can print out instructions for your mural as well.

Hope that helps someone.

Those of you looking to explore this technique would be well-served to familiarize yourselves with the work of the painter Chuck Close, the granddaddy of "pixel" based art long before the "pixel" was a household word.

Free Paint by Pixel software online at diyart.cominstantly converts your photos into a numbered grid with no hassle. Also ready mixed coloured paint sets available to buy online. Hope that makes your project/gift ideas a little easier:)

I made a rasterization with a Souther Salazar picture for my old apartment years ago. Check it out.

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e93/amylooooo/rasterfull004.jpg

This is very cool and would be great for high school art students. I've seen something similar done with free paint swatches from a hardware store.

This is also a quilting design technique. Yay, now I don't have to buy the designer's software.

Awesome job! How did you "boil" the image down in Photoshop? I know how to pixelate an image, just stuck on the "boiling" part. Thanks!

hey ryan, you can use "indexed colors".
find it here: image --> mode --> indexed color.
at that point you can choose the number of colors that you'd like.

good luck!

My question is...how exactly do you determine how many and what colors after you have pixelated in PS? I have tried swatches...I have tried indexed color...but once I get there I'm lost. I'm sure it's simple...but I can't find a step-by-step tutorial. Is there an easy way to do this?